


This is Your Fault

by Catchclaw



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, Domestic, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Roommates, Starfleet Academy, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 20:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9565919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: Sharing a dorm room with James Kirk is a challenge. Sharing an apartment? That's more complicated.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Areiton, the accidental encourager.

Their first year, they live in the dorms. It’s fucking awful.

Two tiny beds, narrow as all get out, and not a goddamn centimeter of privacy. Leonard knows when Kirk blows his nose, when he has a bad dream, when he gets homesick and comms his brother Sam at two fucking AM. Oh, yeah. And when he gets his ass dumped. 

“I thought you said it wasn’t serious,” Leonard says, picking his way around the bottles on the floor, the ones formally full of cheap beer that Kirk sure as shit hadn’t paid for.

“‘Wasn’t,” Kirk says, grumpy drunk. His head’s hanging off the end of the bed and his face is a disturbing shade of purple. “But I liked that guy, Bones. Why’s it the good ones who kick you to the curb?”

Leonard tugs him upright so the kid doesn’t choke on his own tongue. “Maybe because you’re kind of a dick to people? Even the ones you claim to like? No, especially them.”

“Do like,” Kirk says, stubborn. “Do like.” He scrabbles at Leonard’s face, his hands stupid with booze. Almost as stupid as his grin. “Like _you_.”

“My point exactly,” Leonard says. “Hence you fucking trashing our room tonight, huh?”

Kirk peers down at the floor, at the detritus of his evening. “Oh. Huh. Sorry. ‘M sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Leonard says, a little nicer than he means to. “You’re cleaning it up before you go to class tomorrow, got that? Or else I’m dumping all your shit in the quad while you’re taking your Applied Xenogeography exam.” 

The kid makes a noise like he’s dying and falls back on his pillow, melodramatic as hell. “Is that tomorrow? Oh my gods. Fuck me. _Fuck_. Why didn’t you tell me, Bones?”

“I’m a doctor, not a dayplanner,” Leonard snaps. It’s been a long day and he just wants to get into bed, turn off his head, and sleep for a few fucking hours before he has to be in lab again. Is that really too much to ask?

And then Kirk does what he always does: veers hard right from asshole and turns back towards being Jim. “Sorry,” he says again. “Really. I am. I’ll pick it up in the morning. Promise. And I’ll buy you some more beer.” 

Leonard tugs off his tunic, reaches for his pajamas. “You’re damn right you will.”

Kirk sighs, goes quiet. Doesn’t stir again until Leonard’s in bed, one hand on the light. “You really think I’m a dick?”

His voice is small, like a kid that’s fucked up but good and wants you to know that he gets it, why he’s being sent to bed with no supper. This is why they’re friends, Leonard thinks, waving the room dark. Because Kirk’s a lot of things, but self-deluding he ain’t.

“Sometimes,” Leonard says. “But then sometimes, so am I.”

“Hmmm,” Kirk says. “Ok.”

He’s out in two minutes, the brick wall sleep of the drunk, and in three more, he’s snoring, a sound that would rouse deaf zombie Klingons from the depths of the darkest damn hell, and yeah. That first year? The dorms suck.

Their second year, McCoy insists--nay, demands--that they try for an Academy apartment.

“It’s a lost cause,” Kirk says, the tenth time Leonard brings it up. “It’s a lottery system. I told you. And from what I’ve heard, one that’s heavily fucking weighted by seniority and whose ass you’re willing to kiss. You’d be better off throwing your credits in the Bay.”

“Ok, so it’s a gamble,” Leonard says. “But we’re just talking a hundred credits here, Jim. Big fucking deal.”

Kirk rolls his eyes behind his sandwich. They’re sitting on the lawn, cramming lunch between classes. “I can think of at least ten things I’d rather spend my limited funds on, thanks. And I have dates with four of them this weekend.”

Leonard manages not to stab him in the arm. “Tell you what,” he says, “we lose the lottery, I pay you back. We win, you tell me what a goddamn genius I am at least once a day until we have to move out.”

That gets him a grin, the really dangerous one that Kirk saves for card sharks and pissed-off instructors. “You, sir,” he says, offering his hand, “have got yourself a deal.”

Their number comes up, hell yes it does, because the universe does not hate Leonard McCoy. And/or it doesn’t want to see him throttle James Kirk.

“It’s not much,” Leonard says, as Kirk drifts from room to room, fucking entranced. “But there’s a private entrance and two sonics and it comes with the furniture.” He pokes gingerly at the kitchen table. “Such as it is.”

Kirk swings in, beaming. “You,” he says, grabbing McCoy by the shoulders, “are a goddamn genius, Bones. Did you know that?”

Leonard shrugs. “I had an inkling, yeah.”

The apartment, it turns out, is great. Jim having his own bedroom is--not.

He’d been so good about it, that first year, not bringing willing beings back to their room, that Leonard had sort of forgotten to worry about it. But the second Kirk has a door that locks and a bed that’s not two feet from McCoy’s, his previous discretion goes right the fuck out the airlock.

“Can you at least lend them a robe or something?” Leonard asks. “I’d like to be able to make a cup of coffee or eat a damn waffle without getting an anatomy lesson, thanks.”

Kirk is stretched out on the threadbare couch, a plate of pancakes on his bare chest, his mouth moving in semi-sticky rapture. “Mmmmm,” he says. “Yeah, sure.”

“Or a towel. I’d take a towel at this point.”

Kirk laughs. “Jamison would’ve needed a big one. I mean, you should’ve seen the size of his--”

“I did!” Leonard barks. “That’s my whole point, asshole!”

“Oh, yeah,” Kirk says. “Right.”

Leonard squints out the viewport at the sun struggling up through the fog. Takes another slug of his coffee, and--wait a second.

“Jim,” he says, “you said that guy’s name is Jamison?”

“Uh huh.”

Oh hell.  “Not--not Special Envoy Jamison. Not the guy who’s guest lecturing for Nogura this week in Interstellar Negotiation. No. Jim. You didn’t.”

Kirk’s head floats up off of the couch and he beams at McCoy over the cushions. “I did.”

Leonard shouldn’t be surprised anymore, he really fucking shouldn’t, and yet here he is, gaping like a goldfish at his best friend who also happens to be a card-carrying letch. “And did you happen to mention that you were a cadet? That you were gonna be _in his class_?”

“I didn’t mention it, no,” Kirk says. “I didn’t have to, once he saw my uniform. That was kind of the whole reason he picked me up.”

“What?”

Kirk’s grin goes wolf. “Let’s just say, he’s really into that whole student-teacher thing. I mean, _really_.”

Leonard clamps a hand over his eyes. It doesn’t help. “Ok, ok! I get it!”

“Mmmm, not as good as I did.” His voice dips down sultry. “Bones, I was a very bad boy.”

Leonard snorts. "Ok, that I believe.” When he looks up, Jim is grinning at him, sunshine brighter than the stuff outside. “Your complete and utter inability to feel shame never ceases to amaze me.”

Kirk stands up, stretching, holding his plate high over his head. “It’s a skill.”

“It’s a something.”

Kirk pads off towards the kitchen, whistling, and it doesn’t hit McCoy until he’s out of sight.

“Jamison's not coming over again tonight, is he?” he hollers.

Jim peeks around the doorframe. “Nah,” he says. “I’m going to his place.” He waggles his eyebrows. “He says it’s very swanky.”

“If it’s that nice,” Leonard says, “steal a fucking towel or two, huh?”

Jamison is a fleeting thing, like most of them are. But then there’s Romana.

She’s a farm kid, too, from somewhere way out past Cygnus IX, a year ahead of Jim in the command track. She’s spiky and smart and funny as hell. Leonard likes her. For one thing, she and Jim actually spend time together out of his room, which is new. They argue all the damn time, but not about petty shit--about things like: is the Rigelian design for inertial dampers truly superior to the Centuri model, or is it just some interplanetary spat playing out in starship design?

“There’s no way Starfleet would be that stupid,” Jim says, waving his fork around. “No way. You don’t make engineering decisions based on diplomatic hoohah. That makes no sense.”

Romana laughs, reaches past Leonard for the last of the wine. “Diplomacy isn’t about logic, Jim.”

“Yeah, but the safety of a fucking starship should be.”

She sighs, spears her fingers through her short, cerulean curls. “No one’s safety is being compromised. That’s what Starfleet says, anyway. Both designs are equally--”

“Bullshit,” Jim spits. “That’s bullshit, Rom.”

She waves him off. “In Starfleet’s eyes, they’re equal, you know that. Don’t make me quote you chapter and verse."

Kirk grumbles something unintelligible, but he reaches for her, his hand curling around the back of her neck. 

“Thus, the only deciding factor is that selecting the Rigelians’ design carries with it diplomatic benefits that make the Federation--and by extension Starfleet--very fucking jolly.” She grins at Kirk around the rim of her glass. “You don’t have to agree with the argument, Jim. You just have to understand how they got there.”

Yeah, Leonard likes her. But more important: Kirk does. Of all the beings he’s dated, she’s the first one, McCoy thinks, watching them cross swords over the lasagna, who actually makes Jim look happy.

Something happens, though. He’s not sure what. One night, Romana’s there, laughing and throwing data padds at Jim’s head, and the next night, she’s not.

Jim’s on the balcony, smoking something he shouldn’t and looking like he ate some bad chili.

Leonard leans on the doorframe. “What happened?”

Kirk looks over his shoulder, the wind kicking the shit out of his hair. “Don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Which means,” Leonard says, employing his Kirk-to-Standard translator, “you’re the one who fucked up.”

“Go away, Bones.”

That just pisses McCoy off. “No, I will not go away. That woman was good for you! Surely even you could see that, you idiot. Pardon me if I’m a little perturbed that you chose to piss that away.”

Kirk whips around. “Fuck you,” he snarls. “The fuck do you know about it?”

“Jim--”

“No!” Kirk says, furious. “No, I said fucking _no_ , ok?”

He shoves past Leonard and ducks into his room and doesn’t come out for two days.

He stumbles out one night past 2100 hours and settles on the end of the couch. “She was seeing somebody else,” he says, finally. “Not just seeing, but like a serious thing. A lot more serious than her and me.”

“Oh,” Leonard says.

Jim looks up. His eyes are bloodshot and he just looks fucking _sad_. “They’re engaged, Bones. She and this other guy. Gonna get married in a couple months, once the term ends.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Kirk sighs. He filches a handful of crisps off McCoy’s abandoned dinner plate. “And the fucked up thing is that she wouldn’t have told me, if I hadn’t heard about it from somebody else. She’d have just fucking left, you know? Woulda disappeared into the sunset when she was done with me without saying a goddamn word.”

“I’m sorry,” Leonard says.

Kirk gives him a wan smile. “Me, too. I mean, I’m not saying I thought we’d sign a marriage contract, Rom and me, but I thought--” The words trail away for a moment. “But I liked her, you know? And I thought she liked me.”

He polishes off the rest of Leonard’s dinner and one of his own before crashing out in the armchair, listening to Leonard memorize the names of the forty bones inside a Vulcan’s left hand.

Kirk’s the one who finds their third-year apartment off the Academy grounds. It’s in a narrow house on a hill, one apartment on top, one below. There’s no balcony, but the windows are real, the kind you can open, and the rooms are small and bright.

“Feels like real people live here,” Kirk says, their first night.

“Real people who don’t own any fucking furniture.”

Kirk gives him a look. “We’re picking it up tomorrow, Bones. You can live without a bed for one night.”

Leonard laughs, doles out another whiskey. “Look who’s talking.”

They turn off the lights and stand in Leonard’s room. The windows are wide and the air outside is cool, just this side of a sweater. Below them, the lights of the city spill down towards the Bay. From here, the towers of the Academy blend into the skyline and if Leonard closes his eyes, breathes in the jasmine, he can almost forget that there was any world beyond this one, up there in the cold song of space.

“Real people, huh?” he says. “Is that what we are, Jim?”

Kirk chuckles. Bumps his shoulder. “For a little while longer, anyway.”

Their neighbors are a Vulcan couple, T’Lan and T’Sia. Kirk meets them first, because he’s a nosy bastard.

“T’Sia does biomechanics,” he tells Leonard on the way to Classical Quantum Theory. “And T’Lan, she teaches kindergarten.”

“Really?” Leonard tries to picture a Vulcan working with little, snotty kids. He can’t, quite.

And it still seems fucking bizarre until he runs into T’Lan one night on the front stoop, and damn if she isn’t one of the mellowest beings he’s ever met, Vulcan or otherwise. Being around her is like taking a deep, calming breath.

“Leonard,” she says, because apparently they’re on a first name basis already. “You must come to our home for dinner.” The breeze runs up behind them and her coral robes become an ocean, her dark hair turning around her face. “We would be pleased to speak with you both. To come to know you better.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard says, because it’s the only logical response. “Thank you. We’d like that.”

“Dinner?!” Kirk says, later, delighted. “Hell yes.”

They take a bottle of wine--”It’s traditional,” Kirk says, stubborn, even after Leonard reminds him that Vulcans can’t get drunk--and a pot of violets, because Leonard’s mama taught him never to approach a woman’s door unless he was bearing flowers.

“You are so full of shit,” Kirk hisses as they scoot down the stairs. “Since when are you a goddamn southern gentleman?”

Leonard waves a genteel hand. “Some of us, dear boy, are born to it.”

“I have literally never seen you near a flower,” Kirk says. “You are such a fucking liar.”

Leonard reaches for the chime. “Let’s pretend you’ve got some damn manners, huh, Jim? At least for the next couple of hours.”

T’Lan takes the wine, gracious, and waves them into the living area, all cool blues and amethyst. There’s a woman seated by the window.

“Leonard,” T’Lan says, formal, “James, may I present T’Sia? She who is my wife.”

“Leonard,” T’Sia echoes, the medchair purring as it turns towards them. “And James. You are welcome.”

She takes the violets from him gently and guides them into the dining room, sets the pot at the center of the table.

“I understand you are a doctor,” she says. “In Starfleet?”

“Yes. Well, I will be. Pretty soon.”

She glints at him, like sunlight waving over the water. “Please. Sit here, next to me. I suspect we have much to discuss.”

T’Sia has long, black hair that falls in braids down her back, eyes the color of almonds, and a voice that Leonard wants to get lost in, like a waterfall, the words flowing throaty and thick.

She’s also forgotten more about functional biomechanical design than Leonard has a prayer of learning in this lifetime.

“Yes,” T’Sia says, later, as they drink after-dinner tea in the garden, “the temporary neural net we are finalizing will be adaptable to a dozen bipedal species. Perhaps more.”

McCoy sits back on the bench, shaking his head. “A dozen?” he says. “How’s that possible? The differences in neural transmitters alone, much less in brain chemistry, are enormous within a single species, but in _twelve_?”

“Enormous, yes, but there are more common denominators than you would think in the differences.” She blinks, and Leonard could swear that she’s amused. “I can show you some of the schematics, if you like. Sometimes it is easier to illustrate than to explain.”

“Yes,” Leonard says, practically leaping out of his seat, “please!”

The schematics are complex and gorgeous, and oh, god, T’Sia is, too.

“Seriously?” Kirk hollers from behind the shower curtain. “You have a crush on a Vulcan? A _married_ Vulcan? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Leonard squints in the mirror, tugs at the top of his cadet jacket, trying to get the buttons closed without strangling himself. “Not a damn thing,” he says. “I’ve got good taste.”

Kirk won’t let it go. “You know it’s hopeless,” he whispers in class. “I mean, it’s worse than hopeless, Bones.”

“I know that! That’s kinda the point of a crush, you dick."

“Cadet McCoy,” Admiral Flynn says, her voice ringing out through the hall. “I see you have an opinion on this matter. Please, share it with us.”

Leonard does his best not to look like a scared deer. “Um--”

“The ethics surrounding the first Neutral Zone treaty,” Jim hisses, which is enough for Leonard to tap dance two minutes of bullshit.

“That was bullshit,” Admiral Flynn says, her arms folded. “Did you even do the damn reading, McCoy?”

“I hate you,” Leonard says, later, as they push out of the auditorium and into the the sunlight.

“Hey, look,” Kirk says, jackrabbiting at McCoy’s side, “I’m just trying to save you some heartache. I’ve been there, man. Believe me. Unrequited love is not the way you wanna go.”

“Kid, I was doing unrequited while you were still in diapers.”

Kirk laughs. “See, when you pull out that ‘kid’ shit, I know I’m getting somewhere.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s just--I’m glad you’ve found somebody you like, Bones. Seriously. But I wanna see you happy, too, and this isn’t gonna go well, whatever you’re feeling right now. It’s just not.”

McCoy stops. Comes to a halt in the grass, seeing fucking red. “Shut up!” he says, louder than he probably should. “Damn it, Jim, it’s none of your fucking business. And don’t you pretend to tell me how I feel, you stupid son of a bitch! Shut the fuck _up_.”

Kirk stutters, stops. “Ok. Ok, jesus. I’m sorry, I won’t--”

Leonard leaves him there, marches off the quad and pretends not to know James Kirk for a while.

They don’t speak for a week.

It’s dumb and it’s childish and it feels all out of fucking proportion, but Leonard does it anyway.

T’Sia gets back from a conference in Dar Es Salaam and invites him down so she can gush about it, in her restrained, austere way. It sounds mind-blowing and thought-provoking and Leonard doesn’t hear a goddamn word she says. Just moons at her, this beautiful woman who’s so much smarter than he is, than anyone within a country mile. God, all the ways she can see the world, he thinks, all the shit she can conceive of, questions she can ask that he can’t even imagine.

Imagine. Huh.

He wonders what her hair would feel like in his fingers. What it would be like to kiss her, to tip her chin back and run his tongue down her--

T’Sia stops mid-thought. She stares at him, deep, like she’s trying to count the rocks at the bottom of a river.

Uh oh.

“Leonard,” she says. “Your thoughts are very loud.”

He blinks, color shooting up his face. “I--they are?”

She settles back in her chair, and he didn’t realize how close they’d been, bent over a padd she’d set on the dining room table.  “I enjoy your company. I find our conversations extremely interesting. I look forward to them.” She tilts her head. “But I do not have--romantic feelings for you.”

Oh god. Damn Vulcans and their mind-reading juju. “No!" he says. "No, of course not, T’Sia. I--I know you don’t.”

T’Sia makes a little sound, curious. “If you know this, then why were you thinking about--?”

God, he feels like an ass. “Whatever I, uh--" He stumbles. Starts again. "Whatever I feel about you, it’s not because I think you feel the same way. It’s just--sometimes it’s nice to care about someone. Nice for humans, anyway. To have those feelings even if you know they don’t care about you. Sometimes that’s enough.”

It’s quiet for a moment, with only the sound of the breeze, of the trams, to keep Leonard and his humiliation company.

“Leonard,” T’Sia says finally, “it is not enough for you.” Her fingers on his sleeve, a quick brush. “I am certain of it.”

It’s embarrassing and awful and the fucked-up thing is that his first instinct is to call Kirk, to comm him in whatever simulator he’s holed up in on campus and tell him the whole sad fucking tale.

But he doesn’t, because Kirk would come home, he knows it, would Kobayashi out of the Maru and bring a pizza with him, to boot.

He’d make Leonard eat two slices and pour whiskey down his throat and then and only then he’d say, “Ok, tell me. What happened?”

Besides, he’s still pissed at Kirk--even though, it seems, he was technically right.

“Goddamnit,” Leonard says, reaching for his comm.

“Oh man,” Kirk says, 90 minutes and three-quarters of a pizza later. “That is--shit, Bones. I don’t even know what to say.”

They’re eating in McCoy’s room because he didn’t feel like moving after collapsing in a heap of his own shame, not even to turn on the light. Anyway, whiskey tastes just as good on the floor as it does on any couch.

Leonard sighs, lets his head fall back against the edge of his bed. “Not even, _I told you so_? I think you’ve earned that one, fair and square.”

“Nah,” Kirk says. He pours another round, shoves it into Leonard's hand. “I’ll let it go this time.”

They drink for a while in the dark. The windows are open and it smells like oleander, like the freija flowers out in T’Lar’s garden.

“Can I ask you something?”

He feels Kirk shift next to him, their shoulders touching. “Yeah, sure. Shoot.”

“When in the actual fuck have you ever had a thing for anybody that was unrequited?” McCoy laughs, the booze rattling around in his blood. It’s good, though. He needs it. “I mean, as far as I can tell--and have observed, mind you, over the past two and some years--you so much as wink at a being and they leap into your goddamn bed.”

“What?”

“Admittedly,” Leonard says, “business seems to have been a little slow as of late, but I assume that’s your choice.” He swings his glass into the shadows, a grand gesture nobody sees. “I appreciate your stab at sympathy, Jim, I really do. But come on. Apples and fucking oranges. You want ‘em, James T., you can have ‘em.”

There’s a long, long silence.

“Not always,” Kirk says.

McCoy snorts. “Bullshit. Name one.”

“I don’t--”

“Uh huh,” Leonard says, reaching for the bottle. “That’s what I thought.”

There’s a hand on his. Stops him.

“Just remember,” Kirk says, like he’s been gargling barbed wire, “this is your fault. You asked.”

One moment, the world makes sense. The next moment, it doesn’t, because Kirk’s mouth is on his, the sweet pressure of whiskey and spice. Jim is still holding his hand and the angle is weird and they’re still sitting on the fucking floor and he’s kissing Jim Kirk. His best friend. He’s--

“So,” Kirk says, quiet in all that dark. “There’s you.”

“Oh,” Leonard says, dopey. “Ok.”

Then Jim is moving, standing, closing the bedroom door behind him.

“Well,” Leonard says to himself, to his empty glass. “Well, shit.”

He’s on rotation for the next three days, up in the medlab on Starbase One. When he leaves the next morning, crack of dawn early, Jim’s door is still closed. Maybe, he thinks, that’s for the best.

He’s not sure what to say, anyway.

They make him use the damn transporter, because Starfleet hates him. They make him stand on that creepy lit-up lilypad for what feels like forever, poking at dials and whispering, and usually, he’d be thinking about his molecules dissolving into stardust, about the split-second of awareness he’d feel before his body lost all shape and form, but this time, all he can think about is Jim. The way his heart felt pressed to McCoy’s chest. The weight of him. The surprise of it, the shock, god, a split-second of awareness, before what he thought about his life, his friend, lost all shape and form.

The world shimmers, forms a starbase around him, and Leonard thinks: three days of rotation. Right.

He operates on a Tellerite and stitches up an Admiral and tests a freighter crew for Denebian slime flu. He leads a group of first-years through rounds and alphabetizes the med cart and gets into a shouting match with an Ambassador’s attending physician. He attends a Rigelian birth (twins) and sets an Eeoian’s broken tail without getting bitten and goddamn it, he thinks about Jim. 

The kid’s pretty. Ok. Everybody in the Academy could swear to that.

He’s a pain in the ass. Again, general consensus.

But KIrk’s also a halfway decent roommate and an all-around good human and the best friend that Leonard’s had in a decade.

“Well,” McCoy whispers to himself, to the supplies sharing the medical closet where he’s trying to sleep. “Well, shit.”

Ok, yes, he reminds himself in the canteen line, he’s had a dream or three over the years of the fucking-Jim Kirk-into-the-mattress variety, but that was hormones, right? The cost of the living with a guy whose sexuality was like a Roman candle on a good day.

Wasn’t it?

He keeps chasing Jim around in his head, keeps running the kiss on a loop and he wonders what it would have been like if he’d gotten his brain out of the whiskey bottle and kissed Kirk back.

Huh. 

By the time he’s back earthside, his head’s a rattletrap, exhausted by 72 hours of other people’s problems. Mostly of the easily fixable kind. Unlike the one that’s waiting for him behind his front door.

Ugh. All he really knows is that his eyes are gritty and he can’t think in actual words and what he really wants is a shower and ten straight in his own bed, but oh, fuck.

Kirk’s there.

Of course he is.

He’s right there, at the kitchen counter, wearing his beat-up bathrobe and eating pancakes and it’s all so goddamn fucking normal that Leonard wants to laugh.

“Shit!” Jim says, jumping straight up, dropping his fork with a bang. “What the hell!”

McCoy dumps his bag, makes a beeline for Kirk’s coffee. “Sorry.”

“I’m gonna have to get you a bell one of these days. Jesus.”

Leonard gets in a good gulp. Takes another. “Yeah, yeah,” he says.

Even through his haze, he can feel Kirk watching him. Can also, interestingly, feel the heat from his body, the sleepy warm that hasn’t quite worn out yet. Hmmm.

He’d never noticed that before.

“How was rotation?” Kirk says.

Leonard shrugs. Makes a vague noise and reaches for the plate of pancakes.

Kirk laugh, shoves them over. “You can’t think straight, can you?”

“Nope.”

“When’s the last time you slept?”

“No fucking clue.”

Kirk watches him eat, amusement coming off him in waves. “I can make more,” he says. ”I’m gonna have to, now. That was my breakfast. Was.”

“Mmmhmm,” McCoy says. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices that Kirk isn’t wearing a shirt. Well, he never does, in the morning. It’s--

Leonard sets the plate down and looks over, looks at him. Really looks. Jim’s robe is open, tied haphazard at his waist, mostly hiding his boxers. He’s barefoot and his hair is fucking dumb and there’s syrup on the corner of his mouth. He’s also blushing.

Huh. That’s new.

And suddenly, the fog inside Leonard’s head lifts and below him is the Bay, clear as day.

“Um,” Kirk says. “Bones, do you--?”

He’s still trying to talk when Leonard kisses him, bless him, but he shuts up quick, wraps his arms around Leonard’s ribs and hangs on. Makes the softest noise when McCoy opens his mouth and invites him in.

Leonard presses him into the counter and gets his hands inside Kirk’s robe and they make out for a while, slow and hot. He pushes a knee between Jim’s legs and Kirk ruts against him, luxurious, grinning like a motherfucker.

“Oh,” Kirk breathes, his fingers digging into Leonard’s back. “God, you’re good at this.”

McCoy laughs, rubs the sound against Kirk’s cheek. “You don’t have to sound so surprised, asshole.”

Kirk chuckles and tips his head back, baring his throat. “You,” he says, “you are a goddamn genius, Leonard McCoy. Did you know that?”

Leonard slips a hand between them, catches Kirk in his fist, and the sound the kid makes is fucking divine. “Yeah,” he says in Jim’s ear, “I had an inkling."

**Author's Note:**

> My dear cymbalism, there's a reason this story has this title. And it's this. Thanks for luring me into yet another (very pretty) ship.


End file.
